"Almighty God!" he said. He felt nausea all through him. He felt that he was going to cry like a child. And he was trembling, clear down to his moccasins.
Sensing at last the pathos of it, the ghastly woe of it, the broken mother-heart of it, he took his wife’s arm and went down the hill. The supper had been spoiled for him. All the beauty and sweetness of the earth had been turned bitter for him in that moment when he grasped, in full measure, the loneliness and nightmares and stark insane wondering of a mother there with her dead children. He ate one of the rich boudins, a steak, a hunk of roast, and a half dozen biscuits; and he drank a quart of strong black coffee; but he was hardly aware that he was eating. He then folded one of the deerskins flesh side in, making a bowl of it; and in the bowl he put a skin of boudins, a piece of roast, a steak, and a few biscuits. He told Lotus to remain here, alert, hand on her gun, while he went back to the woman. If the woman were somehow to get away from him and rush at Lotus with the axe she was to shoot her, if she had to, or climb a tree, if she could. With his rifle he went up the hill with the hot food, and over to the woman, who now. sat between the graves; and he set the skin of food right before her, turning the folds back so that she could see what was there. He did not speak and he did not linger. He supposed that she would recognize the food and that she would ignore it or throw it away. What could he do or what could any man do that was any good for her? Was there in the whole world anything that could break through such grief as that? Perhaps the Almighty could do something for her; perhaps he was doing it in the only way that it could be done. Sam’s guess was that she would sink deep into sorrow, and from sorrow into death.
But he did not understand her. He might reasonably have asked, What man could? He would never know of her frenzied assaults on the killers that invaded her small world, or that she had totally forgotten her people. If he had known about her visions in the sage garden and her reading and talking aloud to her dead ones he would have thought only what Bill was to say, that she was as crazy as a loon with three eagle babies in its nest. Kate on her side would have found it hard to understand the redmen and the mountain men, who month after month shot thousands of healthy beautiful animals and took only a few pounds of flesh, leaving the remainder to the wolves and vultures; who found delight in waging savage war against one another; who caught and killed lovely creatures, such as beaver and otter, for no more than their skins. She could hardly have understood Sam Minard—for on a high mountain spine he would beat his chest in a raging storm and call on the Almighty to look down on the world he had made.
The next day Sam and Lotus brought three deer from the hills and built fires and jerked nearly all the flesh; and this Sam put in skin pouches and took to Kate’s door. He wanted to touch her hair a moment, with palm or lips, before going so far away from her, but her attitude told him that she wanted him to get out of sight. And so without saying another word to her he took his wife and headed up the river. The cottonwood and aspen were putting on their yellow cloaks, the chokecherry its scarlet; the river, done with its goaded spring torments, was a broad flowing of clear waters, borne down from the highest mountains. It was a beautiful day. A meadow lark was singing exquisitely in two octaves; mourning doves and owls foretold the coming of rain. When, having passed the big bend. Sam saw the far blue mists of mountains south of the Yellowstone, he told his wife that yonder were the Wolf and the Rosebud summits, and the northern most summits of the Bighorns.
The ebullience of his emotions, spilling all day long into spontaneous enthusiasms, or into song, was new to her. Her people were emotional but they didn’t exclaim with delight over such things as flowers, the swift sudden dive of a dabchick, the strange dusk-sounds of the snipe’s tail feathers, the juicy ripe flavor of a wild plum, the wing markings on what he said was a swallow-tailed butterfly, a badger’s footprints. After they swam the Yellowstone they were out of Blackfeet country, and she thought her man seemed to feel that he had no enemies. He would burst into song. He would shout at her—to draw her attention to the things around her. "There!" he said, pointing to the blue and purple belt of peaks lying east and north of the Bighorns. She looked, and saw only mountains and mist and distance. A map of the whole vast sweep of it was in Sam’s mind—the Yellowstone, Bighorn, Wind, Powder, Green, Snake and a dozen other rivers, and all their valleys; and the Little Snake, the Yampah, the Uintahs, and a hundred more. He had decided to stop long enough to say hello to Bill Williams, if he could find the sly lean old codger, holed up in some thicket between Medicine and Bald mountains. From the Bighorn River, which he had been following upstream from its junction with the Little Bighorn, he turned east; and pointing to two peaks, he said to Lotus, "Somewhere between them, if he isn’t dead yet." Bill was not dead and he was not asleep. Early in the morning two days later Sam was walking and leading his beasts, as he pushed his way through tangles and thickets, when suddenly a high shrill voice cried, "Do ye hear now? I wuz nigh to givin ye hell, I was. If I didden think ye wuz a Blackfoot after my topknot I’m a lyun nigger, I shorely be."
A moment later there he came, tall, cadaverous, gangling, a rifle across his arms and his right hand on the trigger guard, his bright almost glittering gray eyes peering out under shaggy brows. The face Lotus saw had a long thin nose, lean bearded cheeks, and a narrow forehead with veins standing out in the temples. He had a high-pitched, almost whining voice that made some men think he was crying. Around his waist hung a lot of contraptions, including a queer-looking bullet mold, an awl with a deerhorn handle in a sheath of cherrywood, hand-carved by him, and a vial made from the tip of an antelope horn in which, in season, he carried his castor bait. Bill had begun life as a Methodist preacher in Missouri, but (according to his story) every time he appeared at the church door the roosters shouted, "Hyar comes Parson Williams! One of us goes inter the kittle today." One morning when preaching at his fervent best a girl in a front seat got his mind so mixed up that he kallated he wasn’t born for preaching. He took his gun and l headed west.
"Wall, tie up my boudins!" he said, ambling over. "If it ain’t Sam Minard. And who is this here red filly?"
"My wife, Bill. Mrs. Samson John Minard, the most beautiful woman in the world."
"Wall now," said Bill, squinting his small keen eyes at the girl. "If this nigger sees good she doan look bad a-tall. Where fer be ye headin?"
"Uintahs. I need four or five packs, for I have a wife to support now."
"They cost, I’ve heard. Ye best spend a night with me, I reckon. I have some of Hank Cady’s huckleberry preserves and the best buffler hump ye ever tasted."
They spent the night with Bill. After supper the men and the girl sat by a small fire and Lotus looked at Bill most of the time, for he was spinning tall yarns and his facial mannerisms fascinated her. If Sam asked a question that touched Bill’s emotions the sunken face would turn grave, the eyes would narrow to slits of light, and Bill would knock the pipe out and fill and light it before uttering another word.
"Ivar Carlsson, ye say? That be a sad tale, Sam. We wuz huntin lass spring, it was over on Shields River. Wall now, I dotta knowed better, I’ll be dogged if I shooden. That time a year the Blackfeet is all over the place. I tell ye, Sam, Ivar wuz as full of arrows as a porkypine, with one stickin plum through both cheeks, another stuck deep in his meat bag, and six or seven in his hump ribs. I tuk them out but it was like butcherin him almost; but he war a mountain man—waugh!—and he never give off more than one little grunt; and I’ll be dogged that wuz when I cut the arrow outta his boudins. That one was so deep I could feel the pint against his backbone. Of course the one stuck through his cheeks I jist whacked the head offen it and pulled it back out; but the one in his meat bag it was plum buried too, and that doggoned one in his boudins. I had to slice him open so I could git inside .... "